Contents

Applications

Ekiga -- Ekiga is a free Voice over IP phone allowing you to do free calls over the Internet. Ekiga is the first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP, as well as audio and video. Ekiga was formerly known as GnomeMeeting.

Resources

UVC webcams

Do you have USB 2.0 controllers on your notebook and desktop? If so, you could benefit from higher resolutions with the Logitech Quickam for Notebooks Pro, Quickcam Fusion and Quickcam Orbit MP. All those webcams are 1.3MP devices and are supported by the linux-uvc driver. Note that the Quickcam for Notebooks Deluxe doesn't fall in that category; it's supported by the spca5xx driver.

Those 3 webcams also work in USB 1.1 mode, but are then limited to 640x480. In that case, you could go for the Quickcam Pro 5000, which is a 640x480 device supported by the linux-uvc driver.

UVC webcams are well supported, but you must be aware of a few issues.

The linux-uvc driver is V4L2-only. This means applications which support V4L1 only will not work. V4L1 is officially deprecated, and have been removed from the kernel recently, so most drivers have or will switch to V4L2 anyway.

The 4 webcams mentioned above compress images in MJPEG for resolutions up to 960x720. This means that applications must be able to decompress MJPEG streams to use the webcam at lower resolutions. Ekiga supports MJPEG compression.

On some hardware, a possible bug in the webcam firmware is triggered by Linux. Logitech is investigating the issue, and an explanation should hopefully be available next week (September 2006). As this doesn't occur when using Windows, we hope that a workaround will be possible. In the meantime, a patch is available to reset the webcam when a problem is detected.